A Portland judge Thursday refused to grant bail to three men accused of torturing and murdering a former member of their Gypsy Jokers motorcycle club.
Multnomah County Circuit Judge Gregory Silver said "the presumption was strong" that Tiler Pribbernow, Mark Dencklau and Earl Fisher acted together to kill Robert Lee Huggins, 56, last summer. The judge's ruling means the trio will remain in jail with no chance of posting bail pending the outcome of their trial, which is tentatively set for fall.
"Now there are some cases that are determined by one or two pieces of evidence that clearly define how the case goes," Silver said on Thursday. "This is not one of them. As I have learned over the last several days, this case is like a jigsaw puzzle. There are dozens of pieces, if not more than dozens of pieces, and the question is whether they fit together and, if so, how well they fit together."
Huggins' battered body was found by loggers on July 1, 2015, minutes after it was dumped in a Clark County field. He had a fractured skull, a broken rib, a broken leg, a removed nipple, nails driven through his boots, slash wounds to his back and face, and many blows to his face.
Police believe Huggins was the target of a revenge killing by Gypsy Jokers Pribbernow, Dencklau, Fisher and a fourth man, Malachi Watkins, who hadn't been seeking release from custody during this week's hearing.
The judge didn't find that the legal standard had been met for holding the three men without bail based on a theory that they "intentionally caused the death" of Huggins -- in other words, that they set out to murder him.
But the judge did conclude that the standard had been met to keep the three men locked up based on a second murder theory -- that they intentionally kidnapped Huggins and caused his death after kidnapping him. That second theory leaves open the question of whether the men intended to kill Huggins, and whether he died as an unplanned byproduct of the beatings.
During three days of hearing this week, police said the defendants acted together to kidnap Huggins from a Southeast Portland home by knocking him on the head with a hard object and zip-tying him; killing him on a rural property near Woodland, Washington; and then dumping his body in a field near Ridgefiled, Washington.
Police and prosecutors contend that the men were seeking revenge against Huggins for burglarizing the Woodburn home of the local Gypsy Jokers president, Dencklau, and tying Dencklau's girlfriend to a chair at gunpoint in June 2015.
Police believe Huggins had committed the home-invasion robbery in retaliation for a brutal beating he suffered in 2014 when he was kicked out of the outlaw motorcycle gang. Club members took Huggins' motorcycle and truck as they ousted him from the club -- because they believed he'd stolen thousands of dollars from the club to support his heroin habit, police said.
Police say Watkins has admitted he was at the scene of the kidnapping. Investigators also say cellular phone data show some of the men were in the vicinity of the house where Huggins was kidnapped at the time of the abduction and in the Woodland area at the time Huggins was likely being tortured and killed.
Police also point to statements they say were made by some of the defendants' girlfriends -- including that Pribbernow had told everybody to burn their clothes and that he had said the encounter had gone farther than it was supposed to.
On Wednesday, defense attorneys pointed out that police turned up no DNA evidence from any of the defendants on Huggins' body or in the Chevy Suburban that police think was used to transport his body.
Alicia Hercher, an attorney for Fisher, described the cellular location data against her client as "thin evidence."
"The thing they have that makes them say, 'We believe Earl Fisher is a killer' is that he supposedly talked on his phone to the wrong people at the wrong time," Hercher continued. "But they don't know what was said."
Although Huggins was immersed in the drug world and had previously worked for the outlaw motorcycle club as someone who would enforce their rules, presumably by beating others up, "he still didn't deserve to be murdered, especially the way he was murdered," said prosecutor Glen Banfield.
-- Aimee Green
503-294-5119
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